On August 26, at London's Hammersmith Eventim Apollo, Kate Bush makes her long-awaited, never-dreamed-of return to the live arena. Rumours of a big, theatrical extravaganza are buzzing, but the show has been kept firmly under wraps. This week Kate herself implored fans to just connect with the rest of the audience – and her – rather than view the shows through smartphones and cameras. As the excitement builds, The Big Issue spoke to a host of people who know and love her about what makes Kate great, and what to expect at the gigs... hold on to your hats!

Here, MARK RADCLIFFE, Radio 2 and 6Music DJ who’s bagged the best interviews with Kate Bush at her home, unravels the mystery of her music...

She’s got everything: she’s personable, beautiful, talented and yet she has a layer on top of that of sheer originality. She’s a one-off. Her work is magical. I love her voice, I love her piano playing, I love her composition and ideas. Her records take you to another place. My favourite album of recent times is A Sky of Honey, the second disc on Aerial, which has birdsong all the way through, tracking a day with birdsong. I love the song on there Somewhere In Between, it works as a piece of pop music but it’s in the middle of this concept album. There’s no one else in the whole world who would have thought of doing this. 50 Words for Snow, those long songs, just her at the piano; she does exactly what she wants to do and has the confidence to carry it through.

From a very early age she could make the music industry bend to her will, whereas the other way around was the norm. She then took time off to be a mother to her son, even though she was kind of working but not at any particularly great rate in those years.

Kate Bush is that old-fashioned thing, she’s an artist – she creates this music and a by-product is people want to know about her personal life. And she doesn’t want to tell them. She doesn’t want to put it on Facebook, it’s her private life. What she prizes over all else is being able to live a normal life with her family.

The thing I found most surprising when I met her is that she was completely normal, she’s a really friendly, chatty, welcoming, working mum. The first time I went to her house she hadn’t had time to make any food so she’s got this cheese flan from the supermarket, she hadn’t made any particular effort in what she was wearing, she was just going about her day and that day happened to include me as well as taking her son Bertie to school and whatever else she was doing.

She’s absolutely not crazy [despite tabloid clichés]. It’s not for me to speak for her, but I don’t think she’s wildly over-concerned, my impression was she finds it quite funny that they think she swans around in a batwing dress in a gothic castle. She’s picking up cheese flans from the supermarket!

I never thought I would get the chance to see her live, I didn’t see her one and only tour and I just never thought it would happen. When I’ve interviewed her I’ve always asked about it and she always said “I’ve not ruled it out”, but I never took that as an indication she was really serious about it. So it was quite a big surprise when she announced the dates.

I would be very surprised if it was anything other than quite theatrical, dramatic and well-designed with some over-arching concept to it, but I’m guessing.

That picture of her in the lifejacket; water has cropped up in her work quite a lot, I don’t know whether there’s some aquatic theme. Will she dance or sit behind the piano or both? Will she talk or will it be a sculpted whole piece? I would be amazed if she bounded on and said “Hello Hammersmith!”.

Keeping the shows under wraps is her way in everything, really. My feeling is not that it’s an overwhelming desire for secrecy. She’s lived outside showbusiness and her way of doing things is to just get on with it without distraction.

She cares very much about what people think about the work. She always asks you very carefully about it. She is interested, and the reaction to records is very important to her, she pours her heart and soul into them. She is wildly imaginative and creative, and she’s fantastically single-minded, quite pragmatic about what needs to be done, not an airy-fairy flighty idea: it’s work, it’s art, the process of creation, and she takes all that very seriously. She has meticulous control over all the music and the artwork. She’s a one-off, a true original. And she’s fantastically good humoured and giggly and smiley

La suite :

Dernière édition par Renaud le Ven 22 Aoû - 19:05, édité 1 fois

_________________This will be my monument, this will be your beacon when I'm gone...

Kate Bush: Before the Dawn signals a new era for pop's enduring enigmaThe singer has managed to retain her trump cards of mystery and surprise before her eagerly awaited London concerts

o Graeme Thomsono The Guardian, Friday 22 August 2014 19.00 BST

Will Kate Bush's shows at the Hammersmith Apollo inspire her to return to a more public career? Photograph: Trevor Leighton/PA

The return of Kate Bush to the stage on Tuesday night after an absence of 35 years is arguably the outstanding musical event of 2014, if not the decade. By comparison, David Bowie's surprise return last year after a 10-year silence looks almost humdrum.

The 100,000 tickets for Bush's 22 shows at the Hammersmith Apollo sold out within minutes in March. Now, the initial sense of shock and awe has been replaced with feverish speculation about what awaits.The handful of appetite-whetting titbits hint, unsurprisingly, at a highly theatrical spectacle. The doctor's daughter from Welling, Kent, who exploded on to the music scene in 1978 with her debut single Wuthering Heights, was already committed to dance and mime. Throughout her early career, animating the extraordinary subject matter of her songs was a priority. Her sole tour, the 1979 Tour of Life, was a groundbreaking mix of mime, dance, poetry and theatre. Her videos were mini-movies, each one featuring Bush in character.

The little we know about Before the Dawn suggests she has lost none of her gift for drama. The RSC's director Adrian Noble is on board, as is choreographer Anthony van Laast, who worked on the Tour of Life. Bush will perform The Ninth Wave, the conceptual suite from her 1985 classic album Hounds of Love, as part of the show, and spent three days in a flotation tank for the filmed sequences. The musicians include Peter Gabriel's guitarist David Rhodes and West End performer Sandra Marvin. There have been excited mutterings about puppeteers. One source said Bush had been obsessing over every detail, down to the design of the ticket stubs. "Driving us mad," they sighed, not unkindly. It's classic Bush: tightly controlled, utterly idiosyncratic. In an age of full disclosure she has somehow managed to retain the trump cards of mystery and surprise.

Beyond its contents, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Before the Dawn is the possibilities it points towards. One comparison is with Leonard Cohen, whose return to the live arena in 2008 after an absence of 15 years heralded a triumphant third act which has delivered two superb studio albums (the latest due next month), two live records, a DVD and a new Greatest Hits collection. His live comeback has revived and recontextualised a career that was revered but somewhat dormant, and in need of a little post-millennial polish. Unlike Cohen, Bush has not been forced on stage by unfortunate circumstances – his business manager had embezzled all his money – but the impact could be similarly kinetic.

The signs are positive. Bush has controlled her career with such fierce independence it is inconceivable to imagine her doing anything against her will. She is not performing live for the money, nor because the industry demands it of her. She is doing it because she wants to (she has been talking about a visual adaptation of The Ninth Wave since 1985) and because the timing is right.She retreated in the mid-90s to raise her son Bertie with her partner, the guitarist Danny McIntosh, at her homes in Berkshire (she has since moved to Oxfordshire) and Devon. But as the heavy lifting of motherhood has lessened – her son recently turned 16 – Bush has become more engaged with her career than at any point since the early 1990s.

She released two albums in 2011 and rebooted Running Up That Hill for the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. In this context, the live shows can be seen as the logical next phase of a process of re-engagement with the mainstream that has been taking place over the past few years. Her 2011 album, Director's Cut, a relatively spare reworking of songs from The Red Shoes and The Sensual World albums, felt very much like a live album, just without an audience. Anyone looking for clues for the setlist could do worse than give it a couple of spins before Tuesday night.Watching on mobile? Click here to view video

The shows are an event in themselves, but also a significant fork in the road. If she is overwhelmed by the exposure we may not see or hear from her for some time. If she enjoys the experience, the ramifications are significant. Before the Dawn will alter the narrative surrounding Bush. Coming – relatively – hot on the heels of Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow, her physical re-emergence as a living, breathing, singing entity is a huge leap after decades of retreat.Not only has Bush not performed in concert since 1979, she has not appeared on television since 1994, and has attended public engagements only four times since the birth of Bertie in 1998, most recently last year to accept her CBE. Before the Dawn will, at last, create a new visual frame of reference for a woman who has often felt constrained by the difficulties of living up to the striking series of creative personae she developed as a young woman.The shows should also put to bed the perception of her being, in her words, a "weirdo recluse". So complete has been Bush's retreat from the spotlight that at times her absence has threatened to overshadow her presence. It's easy to forget that she made her impact as a wildly experimental artist working firmly, and very visibly, within the mainstream music industry.

The early part of her career had all the trappings of the conventional pop star: hit singles, videos, record store signings, TV performances, mimed cameos at European pop festivals. In 1985, she came back after a three-year absence by performing Running Up That Hill on the Wogan show. Even in the 90s she appeared on the Des O'Connor Show and Top of the Pops. Only when Bush vanished in the mid-90s did her creative eccentricities – always a big and positive part of her appeal – really hijack her personal narrative. When she returned after a 12-year silence in 2005 with Aerial it was to fight off rumours that she was mad, or agoraphobic, or a drug addict.Look more closely, however, and the arc of Bush's career isn't quite as abnormal as is often painted. Since 2005 she has released three albums – not so shabby by today's standards – and Before the Dawn seals the perception of Bush moving towards the territory she inhabited during the first decade of her career: a supremely gifted artist who does not hide in the margins, but is capable of delivering her unique vision into the nation's living rooms.The experience of appearing in front of 100,000 fans might make Bush reassess the future levels of her personal engagement. If she enjoys it, it's not inconceivable to imagine her performing on Later … with Jools Holland, or again making videos in which she stars, or appearing on television to talk with a sympathetic arts journalist. Before the year is out she will surely release a DVD of Before the Dawn, as well as a new Best Of collection. Both will reanimate her work for existing fans and deliver it anew to younger generations.

At 56, Bush is in her prime. 50 Words for Snow contained passages as remarkable as anything she has ever done, and Before the Dawn contains the promise of unleashing a period of creativity that could rival the extraordinary peaks of her first. Perhaps in time, rather than a defining hiatus, the silence that fell upon Bush between the mid-1990s and mid-noughties will come to be seen as a healthy pause, a reinvigorating gap, between two imperial phases.Potted profileBorn 30 July 1958, Sidcup, KentCareer Taught herself to play the piano aged 11, then the organ and violin and, by her mid-teens, had composed more than 200 songs. At 14, Bush was spotted by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who helped her get a record deal.

Best of times Wuthering Heights topped the UK and Australian charts when Bush was just 19. She repeated this success with her 1980 album Never For Ever and 1985's Hounds of Love.Low point Bush dropped out of the public eye for many years following the death of her guitarist Alan Murphy and dancer Gary Hurst and the death of her mother to cancer in 1992.What she says "I find that with people that I haven't seen for a couple of years they won't treat me as a human being. And people in the street will ask for autographs and also won't treat you as human … sometimes I get really scared. Sometimes when I'm going to the supermarket to get the coffee and cat litter, I get freaked out and see all these people staring … You start freaking out like a trapped animal." (NME, 1979)What they say "My favourite instrument in the whole world is the human female voice, and Kate Bush is one of the reasons why. It is, by far, a Stradivarius, which is why she rarely deals with the press or isn't in a rush to record. She's one of the few who can be above all that." (Marianne Faithfull, 2011)

• Graeme Thomson is the author of Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush (Omnibus Press)• Jeanette Winterson on Kate Bush• Kate Bush, the queen of art-pop who defied her critics

OBSESSIVE, controlling and wildly enigmatic, Kate Bush is one the most puzzling figures in music but after a 35 year hiatus the songstress is back performing in a 22 show run at the Hammersmith Apollo.

Kate Bush has a say in every detail of her showAS enigmas go, there are few more puzzling than ­Kate Bush. A sighting is rarer than the lesser spotted woodpecker.

So Tuesday marks a hugely significant date in her fans’ calendars – the start of the singer’s comeback gigs. For the first time in 35 years, Kate is back where she belongs … performing to the masses.

For someone frequently dubbed a “frail recluse”, her return to the Hammersmith Apollo for the start of a 22-date run – the same venue she last performed at in 1979 – is as surprising as it is exciting.

But why the hiatus? Why return now, four years shy of her 60th birthday, if fame really is such an ordeal?

One thing is for sure: she does not need cash. Worth an estimated £28million, Kate lives in a £4.6million seaside mansion and reportedly has a helicopter on stand-by.

Her 10 previous studio albums have been largely acclaimed, and the royalties of her debut single, Wuthering Heights, would keep the very middle class star in Cath Kidston and cashmere for life.

Indeed, tickets for these unique dates – now on the black market for upwards of £1500 – sold out in just 14 minutes.

The answer, according to those who know her best, lies in Kate’s work ethic and quest for perfection.

Far from being a recluse, Kate has spent the past three years beavering away in her private studio.

A former colleague at her label EMI says: “Kate is a perfectionist, always has been and always will be.

“As much as she has enjoyed her time out of the spotlight, she knows she needs to get back on stage and share her musicianship to feel truly fulfilled.

“She’d probably describe herself as having mild to middling OCD.

“Even the most innocuous thing has to be just so – in rehearsals, she will go over songs scores of times until she is happy. Kate has had the final say on every detail, to say she’s hands-on is an understatement.

“Although it’s been 35 years in the making, fans can be assured it will be well worth the wait. She is pushing the boundaries, and herself, with this tour.”

With a close-knit team around her, not even her management know quite what to expect from the Before The Dawn gigs. Everyone is sworn to secrecy.

toujours les mêmes pauvres spoilers:

Alongside co-director Adrian Noble, she is said to have plumped for an aquatic theme, even learning to hold her breath in a water tank for one section.

Years before Madonna and Lady Gaga were prancing around in meat costumes or gyrating on crucifixes, Kate revelled in shock. And, at 56, she has no desire to stop now. Fittingly, she hired choreographer Anthony Van Last, the man behind musicals Sister Act and Mamma Mia!, to ensure a visual spectacular.

Much of the set is rumoured to be based around disc one of her 2005 album, Aerial, entitled A Sea of Honey.While no one can accuse Kate of vanity – she has chosen to employ only one full-time make-up artist and stylist – earlier this week she asked fans not to photograph her on stage.

Although she may be a few pounds heavier than in her heyday, this is not because of any fears about her weight. Like many artists, she does not want fans losing the “moment”, behind a small, glass screen.

And as the photographer who knows her best, Gered Mankowitz, put it: “She doesn’t want to be distracted by camera flashes or look out to a sea of cameras, which is an appalling phenomenon.”

Gered was the man behind the seminal portraits for her first No1 smash, Wuthering Heights. By persuading Kate to don a pink leotard, he helped turn her into a commercial and overnight success.

According to Gered, whose Snap Galleries exhibition of unseen Kate Bush images also starts next week, it is little wonder Kate has shunned the celebrity lifestyle. Or that her comeback has been so long in the making.

He explains: “One sensed Kate wasn’t remotely interested in playing the commercial star game. She wasn’t interested in celebrity for its own sake. She was putting together a presentation, a vision.

“It was quite clear she was an artist who would put something together in her own time and put it out when she was ready. Over the 16 months or so we worked together, she became increasingly in control of her own career.

Salcombe Harbour, Devon, where Kate goes with her family“She certainly worked very hard and, as she got more experienced, she became as obsessive about the detail as anybody could be. But when you’re that sort of artist, that’s a good thing, because ultimately she’s responsible for everything that bears the Kate Bush name.

“It’s all her and it’s important she’s so involved with the detail.”

Today, Kent-born Kate lives in a sprawling mansion in South Devon. Her nearest neighbours are a stone’s throw away – that is, if you’re a 20 stone professional discus thrower. It is small wonder she is oft described as “reclusive”.

She lives here with her husband, guitarist Danny McIntosh and their 16-year-old son, Bertie.

With no local community to write of, the family occasionally venture into nearby Salcombe for entertainment.

One resident says: “Kate is always extremely low-key. She blends in and goes out of her way not to be recognised.”

Strangely for a woman who penned a song called How To Be Invisible, Kate loathes being described as a recluse.

In a rare interview nine years ago, she said: “I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person, and I just find it frustrating people think I’m some kind of weirdo reclusive. I’m a strong person and I think that’s why I find it infuriating when I read, ‘She’s not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature’.”

She’s referring to a dark time in Kate’s life when her mum, Hannah, died two years after her dancer Gary Hurst died of AIDS in 1990.

Her guitarist and close friend Alan Murphy had died of the disease the previous year. She described this period as “very, very difficult” adding: “Basically, the batteries were run out. A part of me didn’t want to work.

“I’d got to the point where it was something I didn’t feel good about.”

Things have turned around since then. Secure in her family life, she has continued to excel, despite little album publicity or fanfare.

Last year, two years after her latest album Director’s Cut – for which she earned a Brit nomination but, obviously, declined to attend – Kate made a rare public appearance, going to Buckingham Palace to collect her CBE.

Revered, and now honoured, the stage is once again set for Kate Bush to dazzle. But only one thing is for sure: expect the unexpected …